Partners in Insomnia
by HecateA
Summary: It isn't until she starts spending more and more time with Remus that Tonks realizes that there may be some rhyme and reason to those random bouts of insomnia she's always had. Oneshot. Written for Romance Awareness Day 4: You feel everything your soulmate feels.


**Author's Note: **Enjoy! Written for the 31 Days of Soulmate!AU Day 4: You feel everything your soulmate feels. It's actually kind of surprising that we got 4 days in before I defaulted to Remus and Tonks…

**Disclaimer: **The following characters belong to J.K. Rowling, and this story derives from her original works, storylines, and world. Please do not sue me, I can barely pay tuition.

**Warnings: **NA

* * *

**Stacked with: **MC4A; Shipping Wars; Hogwarts; Harmony of Souls Eternal; Rays of Blades

**Individual Challenge(s): **Cuppa; Gryffindor MC; Hufflepuff MC; Seeds; Golden Times; Old Shoes; Themes & Things A (Love); Themes & Things B (Surprise); True Colours; Rian-Russo Inversion; In a Flash; Yellow Ribbon; Yellow Ribbon Redux

**Representation(s): **You feel everything that your soulmate feels Soulmate!AU

**Bonus challenge(s): **In the Trench; Surprise!; Second Verse (Odd Feathers); Chorus (Middle Name)

**Tertiary bonus challenge: **NA

**Word Count: **2026

* * *

_**Shipping Wars**_

**Ship (Team): **Remus Lupin/Nymphadora Tonks (Technicolour Moon)

**List (Prompt): **Summer Medium 1 (Moving In Together)

* * *

_**Hogwarts Submitting Info**_

**House: **Ravenclaw

**Assignment: **Assignment #1, Criminology, Task #3: Alt: Write about a trend or pattern.

* * *

**Partners in Insomnia **

Tonks was slumped at the kitchen table, leaning on one hand and clutching her third cup of coffee with the other. She still felt about as lively as a Mountain Troll, or perhaps a mouldy tree stump. It was going to be a long day... That much she had known as soon as the old clock had hit 1:00 a.m. and she'd realised that tonight was just one of those nights of insomnia that seemed to strike at random. She'd pattered down from her guest room on Grimmauld Place's fourth floor in her tank top and pajama bottoms, a very classy look when paired with her mismatched socks and a messy magenta hair.

She'd had her wand between her teeth and a book in hand, hoping that she'd at least be able to get through a few pages while she was awake. But no, obviously. She knew by now how these nights went; for no apparent reason, she would feel restless but unfocused, antsy but typically too exhausted to actually do anything. She would spend an entire night without getting any shut-eye, her stomach twisting and turning so she couldn't even eat to fill the boredom. What good was that? Her back would hurt, she'd feel tense and sore, and the pressure behind her eyes felt like it was about to pop. And that was _before _she'd spend the next day wobbling through life exhausted and spaced out. It'd been happening since she was a little girl and she hated it; had no idea why it did. And it never had the courtesy to happen on a day preceding a day off or a day of ongoing training she could snooze through.

She sighed and threw her hair back up in a bun.

That was when the door to the kitchen opened and in came Remus, looking about as tired as she was He seemed surprised to see her.

"Good morning," he said.

"Is it morning yet?" Dora asked.

"Sunrise happened," Remus said. "Trust me, I'm sure."

He was wearing a thermal t-shirt and soft sweatpants, his hair was a mess and a cut by his eye seemed fresh. She noticed a bump in his shirt where his arm may be bandaged.

"Is your arm okay?" she asked.

"Oh, I'm fine," Remus said. "I've looked worse. Is there any of that coffee left?"

"Please, help yourself," Dora said, readjusting so that she was curled up on her chair. She took another sip of her own cup and the sharp bitterness of it should have shocked her into lucidity, but alas.

Remus came to sit at the table in front of her and raised his cup in her direction before taking a sip. He ran a hand through his hair and winced, as if he'd hit a sore spot.

"What are you doing up so early?" Remus said, as if to distract himself.

"It doesn't seem sensible, does it?" she said, cracking a grin.

"Not at all," Remus grinned. "I'm hoping to crash after we've dropped the children off at King's Cross. They won't even be up for a few hours… What about you?"

"Couldn't sleep," she admitted.

"Insomnia?" Remus asked.

"A bloody weird strand of it, but yes," she grumbled into her cup.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Remus asked with a smile. It was a somewhat cheeky smile; he always smiled it when someone brought in strange news that needed to be puzzled out, or intelligence for the Order that didn't make sense and needed some rationalizing.

She gave him the overview of her strange fits of sleeplessness.

"Unless it's a curse, there has to be some rhyme or reason to it," Remus said. He drummed his fingers on the table.

"Maybe both," Dora suggested.

He smiled. "Okay, how often does it happen?"

"I don't know," Dora said.

"Haven't you ever tried keeping track?"

"Not all of us are as enamoured with spreadsheets as you are," she said. He grinned.

"Estimate," he said.

"A dozen times a year," Dora said.

"Okay," Remus mused. He took a sip of his coffee as he mulled this over. "Is it spread throughout the year, or seasonal?"

"Spread throughout," Dora said.

Remus nodded. "Same day of the week?"

"No," Dora said.

"Date of the month?"

"Not thar either," she said.

"Is it regular or irregular?" Remus asked. "Is there the same amount of time, approximately, between bouts of insomnia?"

"I suppose so," Dora said. "I've never really tried to make a schedule for it, I'm more interested in making it stop."

"Well, maybe one clue will lead to the other's answer," Remus said.

"Maybe," Dora said, taking another sip of her coffee. Nope: she still didn't feel quite human yet. "That's enough about my thing. What about you, why are you up at this hour, you usually oh-so-sensible man?"

"Well, my problem's monthly in nature," Remus said. She saw him roll his shoulder painfully—where Sirius had once told her his bite mark was…

"Oh God," she blurted. "It was a full moon, wasn't it? Look at me, sitting here complaining about my stupid insomnia when you've been up all night—do you need anything?"

"No, I'm fine," Remus said with a small, shy smile. "I'll sleep it off eventually. Believe me; coming back home to a fresh pot of coffee is more than I could ever expect."

"Well, cheers to that," she smiled.

They clinked their coffee mugs together.

* * *

They quickly made it a habit of drinking coffee together in the morning. Which led to Dora needing more and more excuses to sleep over at Grimmauld Place when it wasn't strictly necessary and… well, one thing led to another and it turned out that his bed was _far _more comfortable than the ones in the guest bedrooms. That probably wasn't true, but it _felt _true and so Dora ran with it. Even if it meant enduring Sirius Black's constant taunting, she became a semi-permanent fixture of Grimmauld Place.

One night, he kissed the top of her head goodnight at around 8:00.

"Early night," she noted.

"I want to make sure I get some sleep before the full moon," he said.

She nodded and recalled the calendar on her desk at work, where she'd drawn tiny asterisks in the corner to keep track of these things. She didn't want him to know just how much she worried about him—not yet, anyways. He hated being fussed over, even in the smallest ways.

"I can head home to sleep in my own bed tonight, to give you space," she offered.

"You'll do no such thing," Remus said, wrapping his arms around her and holding her tight. "Especially since we're losing tomorrow night..."

"But sleep…" Dora said.

"Is secondary to certain other things," he promised with a grin.

It was only the following night, when she was alone in her apartment and staring at her ceiling at 2:00 a.m. (hating her life) that she realised… Two months in a row?

She slipped out of bed and made her way into the kitchen, trying to be as quiet as possible to avoid waking up her flatmates. She rummaged through their communal bookshelf to find one of their old Astronomy textbooks, where she remembered a chart of full moons for the decade being printed out. She put a proper shirt on and, carrying the textbook under her arm, Apparated to the Ministry.

The Aurors on night shift that day were content with leaving her alone and not saying a word about her pajamas or disheveled hair as she settled at her desk. She rummaged through her drawers to find a loose packet of instant coffee to mix into a mug of hot water. With the smell of coffee filling her nose, she cross-checked her schedule for the last year, the lunar chart in the book, and all her reports and entry logs for the past few months. She chewed on the end of her quill as she experimented with this correlation, reconstructing her schedule and recalling when her last bouts of insomnia had been.

She chewed on her lip as she mulled over the slip of parchment where she'd charted out her last year of insomnia, and wondered if she was truly surprised that they were matched with the moon.

* * *

"Molly," Dora asked innocently as they chopped up vegetables for supper. Well, Molly chopped. Dora was officially not allowed to use a knife in her kitchen, though Molly insisted that she was always happy to feed her. This was just a public safety concern.

"Yes dear?"

"Have you ever heard of that old branch of magic where what happens to one person is felt by another? I know it's rare, but…"

"Do you mean soulmate divination?" Molly asked. "Of course. Whenever Arthur's about to get a cold, I get all stuffed up for no reason. Why do you ask?"

"Nothing," Dora said all too quickly. "Divination's one of the only subjects you can get away with not taking to become an Auror, so I just didn't know much about it."

Molly looked over her shoulder and smiled. "It's always exciting when you find a match, isn't it dear? Like you found a clue that fate's left you..."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Dora insisted.

"Of course you don't," Molly nodded. Still, the smile on her lips persisted. Dora flushed even redder.

* * *

She nearly had a heart attack when she saw her chart in Remus' hands.

"I didn't mean to rummage," Remus said. "I was just emptying all your pockets before doing laundry and found this…"

"Right," Tonks said, blushing furiously. She'd been carrying it around for weeks wondering what to do with this piece of information. She hadn't had a good idea of how to break this piece of news to him, but she knew she hadn't wanted it to be like this.

Remus looked at the chart again, and then back at her.

"Every full moon?" he asked.

Tonks swallowed.

"I went even further back in time and remembered being sleepless the night before my cousin's bar mitzvah and… that was on a full moon," she shrugged. "Or my first night at Hogwarts. And the day before I sat my Auror exam—though that one came in handy, because I sat down and memorized all the potion recipes for all the stupid poisons I had to learn and made up a song to remember them, and…"

Remus cut her off by crossing the room and kissing her square on the lips, pressing the list against the small of her back as he held her.

* * *

She had coffee ready in the kitchen. She'd even gone out of her way to stop by one of their favourite coffee shops and buy their favourite roast of beans the day before, to try to make the morning a tad nicer.

She'd heard Remus come in and then go upstairs to shower and change into fresh clothes before joining her. He opened the door and smiled a bit when he saw her there, with two mugs and the French press laid out on the table.

"Do you still love me now that you know that I'm doing this to you?" he asked.

"I used the French press, didn't I?" she grinned back.

* * *

She heard the door of their little flat open and close.

"It's me," Remus called. "Remus John Lupin, son of Lyall and Hope, husband to Dora. My favourite jam is raspberry and your hair was purple when we got married."

"Sounds like my husband and not some random Death Eater who's wandered in past our wards," Dora called from the kitchen where she was pouring out their twin cups of coffee. She'd used the good beans too. "I promise not to jinx you if you come in."

Remus came into the kitchen, walking stiffly, eyes small and tired. He smiled when he saw her. And his favourite mug.

"I won't kiss you until I've done something about this bad breath," he said, wrapping an arm around her.

"I appreciate that," she smiled, hanging him his cup.

They clinked their mugs together.


End file.
